[ExI] Judging radical possibilities

[Tomaz Kristan]

Interesting points. But as I see things, the Relativity is not well since
the Ehrenfest's paradox. What means, that the Relativity was not a good
answer to Michaelson Morley experiment. I have no answers myself of course,
I just see the troubles with the current set of physics.

It would be no great surprise for me if those FTL neutrinos are a real thing
and not a fluke of some kind.

It just can't go worse, than it already is for more than 100 years. The
Relativity was invented to eliminate apparent paradox of MM failure to
measure our speed agains the aether. Unfortunately Ehrenfest stroked and the
solution was never viable, in fact.

 I am a purist, when comes to logic.

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> Tomaz Kristan wrote:
>
>> > Einstein was wrong don't notice that there is an even more plausible
>> conclusion if these findings are real: causality is wrong.
>>
>> It's far more likely that Einstein was wrong than the causality, IMO.
>>
>
> This is an interesting statement. Let's (for this thread) drop the question
> about what we actually think of FTL or relativity, and instead look at the
> quite interesting meta-question "How do we judge the likeliehood of radical
> changes of physics?"
>
> Assuming we were to have to either drop relativity or causality, but did
> not know which, what method would we use to determine the most rational
> course of action? Obviously we would try acquire relevant information to
> make the choice, but if that was not forthcoming it seems we would use other
> principles.
>
> One would be simplicity: which of the two is the most complex or introduces
> more concepts? But both can be formulated in very succinct ways with simple
> postulates.
>
> The common sense approach, basing judgements on past experience, might seem
> to give an overwhelming support to causality rather than relativity. But
> this is likely suffering from serious parochialism, since we live in an
> environment where relativistic effects are minor. On the other hand, it is
> not clear what environment would correspond to a "neutral" view of the laws
> of physics.
>
> Looking at a review of the topic like
> http://plato.stanford.edu/**entries/causation-process/<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/>and
> http://plato.stanford.edu/**entries/causation-backwards/<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/>
> it might look like causation is on shakier ground because there are so many
> different schools of thought, and arguments against retrocausation mainly
> seem to build on avoiding paradoxes. But having multiple interpretations or
> models just shows that it is a pretty active area; the lack of consensus
> might be due to lack of data to force a particular conclusion. In physics
> this is usually bad news: there is floppiness in the theory, and Popper et
> al. will claim it is unfalsifiable or at least a worse theory than one with
> less freedom. But in philosophy this might be a less strong argument: we
> might just not have found the right way of expressing ourselves that unifies
> the different takes on the topic.
>
> The proof by paradox is in worse shape. Just because the consequences are
> nonintuitive doesn't mean they cannot happen. Just consider much of modern
> physics. If we are talking about radical new possibilities we should expect
> unprecendented things that are outside our normal experience. However, most
> people would think that true paradoxes cannot happen: we can't get actual
> contradictions in the laws of physics, and hence theories suggesting them
> must be wrong. But we accept some contradictions in our understanding
> because we think the real state of the laws of nature is contradiction-free
> and our theories are just partial models (standard example relativity and
> quantum mechanics). We also often find that other laws of physics intervene
> to prevent contradictions: Novikov's self consistency principle seems to
> show that quantum mechanics prevents many time-travel paradoxes by giving
> them zero probability. The reductios do not take this into account, and
> hence fail. While reductio ad absurdum works fine in math (where intervening
> extra laws cannot happen if we make a good proof)  it might not work well on
> physics at all.
>
> In the end it seems that knowing one possibility is wrong and the other
> right (or, with some small probability, both are wrong and the world is even
> stranger) leads to a situation a bit like moral uncertainty: you think there
> are moral rules you should follow, but you are not entirely certain which
> are the right ones. As long as you keep to situatons where both give the
> same results you can act with confidence. But elsewhere, finding good
> rational action strategies is tough. Some of the ideas in moral uncertainty
> theory might be applicable, but it seems that the one thing all theories
> support is the gathering of more information. Which might be easier in
> physics than in ethics.
>
> (however, if we actually had reason to think we could get metaethically
> relevant information from some experiment, it would probably be more
> important than any physics experiments we could imagine, since the
> information would promote acts of true value directly. The LHC will just
> tell us a bit about how the world is, while a Large Ethics Collider would
> tell us a bit about what we ought to be doing (if anything). )
>
> --
> Anders Sandberg,
> Future of Humanity Institute James Martin 21st Century School Philosophy
> Faculty Oxford University
> ______________________________**_________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/**mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-**chat<http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20110925/03bc6616/attachment.html>